Reposts from the Road - Water Rushing In

Looking at the waters on a foreign shore in February, the water clear and enticing, it's hard to believe that back home the ice is still melting, water pooling up in the cold dark. It got me thinking about visit up to the Great Lake on which my state sits on its southern border. I love that area, especially in the Spring when the ice starts breaking up. Being shallow, Lake Erie will often freeze clear across, with great masses of ice that look like frozen waves, piled up against the shores. Work has taken me up there more than once, and when my day was done, I would sit, bundled up against the cold, watching the earth slope to the water, the wind against my face, a caress of cold, slow and pale.

I seemed like I was just there, in March, when winter drew to a close, shadows stirred, the season shifted. Another winter, away from the skies, those precious evenings aloft a memory, bought in by the elements, herded inside like a recalcitrant horse to a dark barn. A winter's routine of chilled mornings and dark nights, cold absolution for the time I'd spent out in the sun in months past. The days themselves were unchanged, but what I was able to do in them was, with mornings and nights passing in the immaculate intervals of quick daylight and long nights in front of the fire wishing for the cold to pass and Spring to arrive. Yet, with the sound of breaking ice heralding the new arrival of Spring, I thought again of how quickly another season flew away, time and tide waiting for no one.

I remember one cold night in front of the fire pondering over Joseph Conrad's story "Youth", an old man's story of his perilous experiences as a young seaman on a storm-wracked coal liner. Having been a headstrong young woman, taking on one dangerous job after another, I empathized with what he said. "I remember my youth and the feeling that I will never come back anymore, the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men". But soon, I learned just how fragile we all are, as fate resolves us of all integrity, leaving us as broken scatterings of all that was, smells of cooling flesh and salty tears, an illusions of ice and rain and fire, detached and secret, yet oh so familiar.

How easy when we are so very young, to think we are invincible. Certainly some of my adventures would indicate that I too subscribed to this vision. But with adulthood, not only comes responsibility, but loss. Suddenly, for myriads of reasons, aging, illness, war; the people around you, as reliable as the sunrise, leave you, and in their absence the sound of their goodbyes resonates in the emptying heart of your soul. But you don't call back for to do so, would be to admit our own mortality.

But you hear the echo . I see it in the shape and form of things broken past integrity. I see it in a stormy sky, as lightning stains the dark, cold air shaping cold earth in cold darkness. The sky lay blind and warm upon me, touching my skin, my form a wet seed growing wild in the cold dark earth.

That last night on Lake Eire, I heard it in the cold breath of a beautiful woman who was also sitting down by the lake on a bench close by me. She was wearing a thick hat that covered what appeared to be a bald head. With an ethereal face, skin drawn pale and tight across pronounced cheekbones, she sat on another bench in an expensive coat, not reading, not doing anything more than I. Just sitting there in that complete silence in which one does not need to be a doctor to see the translucent, drawn quality of her skin and the accepting gaze outward, in which she probably listened to the precious beat of her heart fueling the irreparable decline of her body.

I moved to a break wall about 20 yards away, to give her some privacy while we stared out at the lake. From a distance it looked deceptively flat, as if you could walk on it. If you looked out beyond, you can see the motion as the ice breaks up and if you listened closely you could almost hear a faint sub-aquean rumble as chunks of it break off as the movement of waves reclaiming their space disturb the quiet. What is it about the water that draws us? I remember as a kid we'd spend summers out West at my Uncle Glen's almond orchard in California and we'd swim in the irrigation ditches, riding the rushing flood of water that came sluicing down, the water moving fast, grabbing our shorts and pulling us down and forward. Not so deep and fast to as to be overly dangerous for a good swimmer, but enough so that as a kid, for a moment, you were part of something wild, wet and unstoppable, something so much bigger than you. And as we came rushing down the sluice way in that burst of water, something in each of us was released in a torrent from deep within and we let it carry us until we were free.

We weren't blissful to the danger, anymore than I was unaware that the waters of this lake I sat on that night were without danger. I'd been out enough in a small fishing boat, to know that the waters, like the sky, hold their own dangers. Pilots of land or sky, we are aware. For just as the Great Lakes can be deadly, death as well swims in the water-like flow of the winds. Like a river, the sky can be be tranquil but it can just as easily be wild, with predators cruising it's currents and the distance back to the banks of your ship much further than it appears. I've always taught my flight students to respect that, for fate waits in those dark eddies under moss grey clouds. I think about that each time my hands bring up the throttles.

There's always a risk. As much as I love to fly, I have spent enough hours aloft to know that the heavens are a two edged blade, one of joy and one of violence, that can cut you clean from the sky without a moment's hesitation. I think about that now, alone and cold on the edge of a vast field of crashing ice as a osprey dives down for prey, his talons glinting in the last scrap of daylight. While this stranger and I sat out there, alone and together, the rest of the community staying home and warm, basking in the illusion that they were safe. Maybe illusion is really all they have. I'd rather be out here, facing the cold and the crashing ice, facing life. For I learned a few years ago, as did much of the country, the self induced damage that living with an illusion can do.


The stranger and I sat there, both wondering the same things perhaps. What would life bring us in the coming year, bracing renewal, or an end to our dreams? Will we be here this time next year to witness the ice break up? And if we are, will we even be the same person? Heraclitus is the Greek philosopher who once said essentially that you can't step into the same body of water twice. Maybe it was the same river twice, I don't recall the exact quote but I do remember he said that just as the water " is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not." As the water moves and changes with the seasons, so do I and I believe my life is as fluid and momentous as the water I love.

I think of saying something to her, words of comfort, words of hope, but they dangle from my lips like spiders from a barn beam, held by only fragile threads of thought, twisting in the breeze. So many times, I'm left to offer words, of closure, or reason, and find that words are just a shape to fill a void. She looks at me for just a moment, as if sensing I was going to say something. But I don't. Another moment lost. Forlorn echoes of words held soft on my lips, hesitant to let go. I simply smile and turn away, and she nods as if in acknowledgement.

The high disinterested sky was darkening and it was time to head back., but I hesitated. Winter faded as darkness ascended, a great chunk of ice tore free, as water reclaimed yet another area. sending seagulls into the air with an alarm. The woman did not look at me, but looked at the water, like myself, reluctant to leave.

The water held us there, pouring in filling that void so secret and dark. Water reclaiming our world.